


He Loved The Sea

by voices_of_salt



Series: The Riera Cycle [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Duty, F/M, Forbidden Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 20:03:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9458390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_of_salt/pseuds/voices_of_salt
Summary: The backstory of Mercedes’ big brother,  Simó Riera, eldest scion of Clan Riera, who could not sail to save his life. And, in a clan too small and provincial to know that any other skill existed, being such an abject failure wrecked him. He also fell in love. This is the story of that disastrous affair.(He then became the alcoholictrainshipwreck of a man, but he got better with time. He’s not an angry drunk anymore: he taught every young Riera how to dance. And, though he no longer had the desire to ramble all over Lleida, he instilled a love for the old Riera ruins in a young Arnau. Simó has always been godfather to all the Rieras who didn’t fit into the incredibly limited Riera definition of “valid human being”. If Joana Riera i Marques will save her clan, it’s because Simó taught her to love herself for who she was, and to sing.)TL;DR: Simó is the best of us. He is a Disney Princess.One day, he’s going to convince Mora Garwhal to marry him. You are all invited to the wedding.





	

 

> _“See, it was a woman. He fell in love.”  
>  “No, no, no. I heard it was the sea he fell in love with.”  
>  “Same story, different versions. And all are true.”_

 

The _taverna_ was the quintessential Lafanese home away from home, twin to a hundred different dockside enclaves the world over. It might have been in any port, in any kingdom: the same skeins of garlic and red peppers hanging from the rafters, the same lively flow of conversation in Lafanese in the background. It could have been anywhere. But for Simó, it would always exist as fixed point on the chart of his life: a place frozen in time, just before the tide turned.

 

“Are you in love with the sea, then?”

“I beg your pardon?” Simó turned to the woman next to him at the long table, and nothing was ever the same again.

 

A month ago Simó had stood on the docks, guitar case leaning against his leg, watching his ship sail home to Lleida. It marked the end of another disastrous foray into command, this time as third mate. He watched her go, reaching for his one scrap of comfort: at least he’d had the courage to leave.

He kept his vigil, watching until the white speck of her topsails dipped below the horizon, then rose up one last time. Simó turned away, head bowed, and gave himself wholly to despair.

After a while he wiped the tears from his eyes and picked up his guitar—his consolation and his shame. Alone, he stepped into the crowd, and the tide of dockside humanity swept him away.

 

For weeks now, he’d been exploring the city by day and playing in the _taverna_ for his bread and wine by night.

Men and women would approach him after he played, drawn to the music. When he played, he was a summoner. He called up their souls, binding them to him with wood and wire so his feelings became their own. The intimacy was not one-sided: he knew the potency of his own spell. He felt the way he lifted them up out of themselves, out of their own beautiful, infinite little worlds, until his private joys and sorrows became theirs, and theirs were his, the total so much greater than the mere sum of its parts. For a moment, in the music, not a one of them was alone.

When the songs ended the waters rushed back and each soul was an island again. The pain of that sudden return to isolation was why they sought him out after he played. He knew that when these people came to him, it was a tribute to his skill. But they wanted the magic, not the magus.

 

This woman seemed no different.

 

“Your colours: you’re a Riera,” she flashed him a white smile—the teeth less white for being in a pale face, for a Lafanese. “Aren’t you renowned sailors?”

“Not I, senyorina,” Simó said, smiling through the truth. He nudged the guitar case at his feet. “To my shame, I’m afraid my skills tend more towards the musical.”

The woman glanced down at the guitar. She wore no shawl or veil, and her fair hair fell in a curtain between them as she looked down. “A musician indeed.” His ear caught the hint of a northern-Lafanese lisp.

“It is as my lady says. I try not to disgrace my instrument.”

“And modest, too,” she said, a note of private amusement in her voice that strummed his nerves.

“You have me at a disadvantage, senyorina. Or… senyora?”

“Oh no,” she said, still studying his guitar case. “‘Senyorina’ if you please, Senyorino Riera.”

“Senyorina, then,” Simó repeated. She was wearing a common sailor’s slops: a mishmash of colours that gave no guide to clan politics. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“Do I?” She raised her head, studying him.

“No,” he admitted.

“Good,” she sat back, crossing her legs at the knee and leaning back in her chair. “I’ve no use for a lover who dissembles.” For herself, she had ceased all attempts to disguise her accent.

Simó swallowed, feeling the sea floor drop off beneath his questing feet. But, Riera to the core, he struck out into deeper waters. “Senyorina Viernes, then.”

She inclined her head, smiling politely. Simó shivered. Beneath the smile was a keen interest in _him_ that cut through clan colours, alliances, and expectations of birth. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but still she smiled.

Unable to help himself, Simó leant forward, ruled by the same impulse that would make him press his thumb against a blade to test its edge. Gently, he took a lock of her hair between his fingers. It lay soft, almost weightless against his skin.

_I have held slivers of sunlight in my open palms as they slanted in through my window_ , his lyrical soul said, _And they were never so beautiful, nor seemed so impossible to hold._

“My name is Simó,” he said. “Simó Riera de Domonova i Riera de Lleida.”

“Yes,” she said.

The silence stretched between them, and he twined her hair between his fingers. She watched him, hazel eyes unreadable. Heart pounding, he curled her hair tighter around his finger. Soon she must lean in or still his hand.

The soft _krrr-snick_ of a folding knife locking into place sent a shock through his trained reflexes. Simó would have leapt backwards, but he already knew he was a dead man. An ivory-hilted vendetta blade had appeared in her hand: a foot of naked steel, glinting in the lamplight.

He would not beg. He would not shame his family. But his heart ached at the thought of leaving so beautiful and cruel a world, and one he’d still seen so little of.

Her hand moved faster than eyes could follow. Simó held his breath, waiting for the pain. There was a sound like tearing silk, and she leant back. Heart pounding, Simó looked down at the severed tress between his fingers. He closed it in a tight fist, hiding the trembling of his hand.

“You know the songs and stories, _guitarristo_ : I have given you a gift. You must give me something of equal worth, I think.”

She rose, her wide sailor’s trousers falling just to above her calves. As she stood, Simó saw that she was slightly pigeon-toed. Somehow, this absurd, tender detail destroyed the last redoubt of his heart.

He took her hand as she made to go, and pressed it to his lips. Her skin tasted of salt.

“Very good,” she said softly. “Very good, _guitarristo_.”

“Senyorina,” he replied. “You play me most exquisitely.”

“Until tomorrow night, then.” She slipped her hand from his.

“Until tomorrow night,” Simó agreed.

 

* * *

 

 

Simó played, body rocked by the rolling swell of his chords. He let the music flow through him, feeling his heart draw up the songs within as the moon draws the sea. All this, for nothing. He was pouring out the spring tide of his love, his guitar singing for her alone, out of all who’d come to hear him. And she had barely glanced his way.

She sat at her small table, sipping white wine. As he watched she turned, laughing, to a friend, though he could not hear her.

Joy bled from him in an ebbing stream, trickling out through his fingers in minor intervals.

Still, Simó played. He played with all the skill he had, with all his heart, with a virtuosity he’d hardly known he possessed.

_Hear me,_ he begged. _Hear me._

Blushing, a young woman took the hand of the girl next to her. An old man reached out and gently pulled his wife’s shawl back over her shoulders. A sailor at the front shoved away from her table, covering her face and fleeing into the crowd.

The Viernes woman turned to him, her hazel eyes sharp and clear. In an instant, he saw that she had heard every modulation and grace note. Not only had she heard, she had understood. The tide turned, his happiness running so sharp and swift that at first it felt like pain.

Then Simó saw her tilt her head to listen to something a companion murmured in her ear, and her gaze slid away from him.

The song was not meant to have lyrics, but he found himself leaning forward with the words already on the tip of his tongue:

_“I love the sea,”_ sang Simó.  
_“There are none so beautiful as she._  
_But every sailor wonders:_  
_Can the sea love me?”_

 

* * *

 

 

As the sweat began to cool on his skin, he pulled the sheet over them both. Simó buried his face in her hair, filling his senses with her. During their lovemaking, he had known she was there with him. Now she was gone again.

“What is your name?” He asked, wanting to bring her back.

She spoke to the darkness of the room: “Ysabel.”

“Ysabel,” he breathed. He laid his hand over his chest, the place that pained him neatly covered by his palm.

“Don’t tell me it’s as beautiful as I am,” she laughed.

“Would you have me be a liar?” Simó asked hoarsely.

She did not answer.

Simó reached out and touched her cheek. “I will lie to my family, but do not ask me to lie to you.”

“I am not merely a Viernes,” she said. “I will be _the_ Viernes. I am tanist, and will be chieftain in time.”

What little joy their lovemaking had won him shattered. This despairing fall from bliss back into pain was already familiar. In time, he would cease to even wonder at it, growing accustomed to the dull ache in his breast until it seemed a more natural state than happiness.

“I may be the Riera tanist, though they have not chosen yet.”

She placed her hand over his, holding it against her cheek. He shut his eyes, heart aching at feeling her hold him close for once, rather than the other way around.

“I know,” she whispered.

 

* * *

 

 

“Lunacy! Are you a man with a guitar or a guitar with a man?” She laughed, hiding her face in his shirt. “Is everything the lyric of some song to you?”

Grinning, Simó encircled her in his arms, gazing down at her half-concealed face. The summer sun had darkened her skin so she hardly looked a Viernes at all. They were both a little drunk, both breathless from laughing. He had crowned her with a coronet of almond blossoms that shed white petals through her hair like the snowflakes of the north.

“It’s true,” he said. “You were born to be a queen, my Ysabel.”

“Queens!” She grumbled. “Hereditary stupidity; we’d be no better than the imperials. In a generation my descendants would be pampered imbeciles.”

“No grandchild of yours would dare.”

“Hmph,” she said, not displeased.

“Your head was made for a crown,” he said, kissing her brow. “Gold amongst the gold.”

“Now you’re being even more foolish,” she shook her head, laughing and slipping from his arms. Ysabel flitted away, the sunlight glinting on the heavy silver belt around her slim waist, and on the hundreds of minute silver buttons on her coat and trailing sleeves. “Do you really walk through the world thinking such dramatic nonsense?”

“Maybe?” he said, following. “I don’t feel everything so strongly, but when you notice something particularly beautiful, or something particularly painful, how can you not try to put what you feel into words, even if only in the privacy of your own mind? It gives a name to them, and makes you see clearly what you feel, and so you feel it more keenly. You know it and can own it, I suppose.”

Ysabel walked on, looking back at him over her shoulder. “Surely trying to name a feeling limits it? If you describe it, you’ve tried to pin it down with words. It sets boundaries in your mind. You must lose something of what it is or might have been the moment you decide, ‘This is joy’ rather than, say, ‘This is contentment’”.

Simó shrugged. “Of course. That’s why music without words always expresses more than lyrics ever could. But really, for the average human being—and I’ll allow that my golden Ysabel may be no mere mortal—naming an emotion at least lets you truly know some part of it in that moment, even if it is only a fraction of the entirety of what you feel.”

She stopped, whirling to face him. “But that diminishes it! Saying ‘love’ and ‘duty’ implies that they must, on some level, be distinct from another. Better to never attempt it, and be assured of the raw purity of the thing unnamed.”

He laughed at that, and laughed even harder as he saw how astonished she looked at her own statement. “Why Ysabel, have you been secretly a romantic all this time?”

“And now you limit me—inaccurately, by the way—with your word ‘romantic’. I’m being realistic, that’s all. I can see a white flower and not wander off into flights of fancy saying its petals are white as moonlit doves’ wings.”

She reached out, cupping her hands around a white rose and turned to him, eyes gently mocking. 

“Do you ever just see a rose as a rose?”

“Not if it’s in your hands.”

Ysabel looked away. She studied the rose as she held it, tilting it this way and that. “I wonder if you see truly, when you see through all those strong feelings of yours.”

“I think I do,” Simó said, slipping his arms around her waist. She leant back against him, still holding the rose in her hands.

“I wish I saw as you did. But how do you see me?”

“Ysabel, had I gold and the jewels of a king I would spend it all, that you might still be mine and crowned as you are: my golden queen.”

Ysabel turned in his arms, standing on her toes to press her lips against his. Then she sniffed, wiping her eyes and laying her head against his chest.

“My _guitarristo_.”

 

* * *

 

 

She looked up from her papers and pushed her chair back from the desk, eyes flashing. “What do you want from me, Simó? Do you even know?”

He stood before her, appalled to find himself happy that she at least thought about him when he was not with her. Her distance – her cold, and her silence – had long since changed his world until words that would once have been a source of agony now brought a broken kind of happiness. A wiser man would have lied, but Simó answered her with all the truthful despair of his adoring heart: “[Nothing. I can ask nothing from you](http://evry-day-im-tumbling.tumblr.com/post/149398365949).”

“You don’t pause to think about our families,” she said accusingly.

“No.”

“You don’t even care about alliances!”

“We both know I’d make a poor one, Ysabel.”

She glanced sharply at him, a flash of cool respect showing in her eyes. Simó dropped his gaze. He knew she esteemed a proper Lafanese selflessness above all other virtues. Ysabel had ascribed his honesty to some final, self-sacrificing, honourable adherence to truth; even after all this while, he saw that she did not know him at all.

Pain was such a familiar friend he could hardly comprehend this sudden, unlooked-for increase. Simó’s throat ached. He’d learned to lie by omission, to hold her in quietly in the dark while the words he longed to say crowded up from his breast to choke him: _I don’t care about the rest of them. Why can’t we be enough, just the two of us? Why can’t love be enough?_ Nothing he had done had brought her closer, so perhaps it was folly to imagine he had the power to drive her further away. But still he could not say these things aloud.

He was a puzzle to her: the Riera who could not sail, the lover who selfishly asked for nothing. It appeared that mystery was all he had to offer. Yet he could not even hold that back. He told her his secret truth, as he’d told her a hundred times before, trying to make her understand: “I love you.”

 

* * *

 

“You should go.”

He raised his head from his hands. Steadying himself on the bedside table, Simó slowly rose to his feet. Even now, he could only do as she wanted.

“I won’t tell my clan about – about what we had,” he promised.

“I know.” Ysabel stood at the railing, looking down over the courtyard below her.

The wind stirred the curtains, a favonian hand wafting sheer veils that concealed and revealed her sun-dappled form by turns. She swam and sparkled through his tears, so perfectly lovely there in the sunlight that Simó mistook the moment his battered heart finally broke for a pang of joy. “Musicians, romantics, and fools: all of a kind,” she’d said once, and kissed him with her arms twined around his shoulders.

That had been before. Now Simó stood by the bed, reeling as loss cut him adrift from his moorings. He would be foolish. He would be honest. There was nothing else left to lose.

“Ysabel,” he pleaded. “Ysabel, please look at me.”

She did not turn.

“Ysabel,” he said again. “I love you more than anything in this world, Ysabel.”

The tanist of Clan Viernes had been a statue of ivory and gold, but at last he saw her move. It had been only the faintest twitch of her shoulders, but he had studied her with such abject devotion for so long that he could not be mistaken.

“Ysabel Viernes, I love you more than words or song could ever express. I love you more than blood or duty, more than life or reason. I envy the earth for knowing each tread of your foot, and the sea for each kiss of a wave it lays on your skin.”

“The sea, Simó?”

He did beg, then: “Ysabel, _please_.”

“What do you know of the sea?” she asked.

Simó swayed, reaching out for her. The wind gusted stronger, lifting the veiling curtains, and he saw her face as she turned to him. He froze, his outstretched hand changing from a plea to an offer.

“Ysabel,” he said again, as though her name was a spell that might yet bind her to him. “I know you love me. Come with me.”

“I have my family to think of! And where to? Where could you even take me to, such a sailor as you are?”

He spun away, doubled over in anguish, covering his mouth with his hands.

Shame and despair threatened to wholly overwhelm him. Then, teetering at the brink of an abyss, Simó remembered his family: his grief was his own, but his honour was Clan Riera’s.

Slowly, he straightened.

The world spun around him, but he forced himself to take one step away from her, then another.

The sound of his sandals on the white marble floor seemed deafening. Simó crossed the room to the bed and picked up his guitar from the floor. He could feel the weight of it in his hand, but at a distance, as if it was a burden carried by another man.

His feet carried him to the blank wall that concealed the secret passage. There he stopped, his hand resting on the familiar wall sconce of the secret lever.

“I love you, Ysabel,” he said, for the last time. “I don’t know: I may always love you.”

The awful truth of his own words nearly robbed him of his strength, and his hand tightened on the lever as he steadied himself on it. The door opened: a dark, lonely passageway he knew by heart.

He took a deep breath.

“I hope you never regret what we had,” Simó said. “I hope, when you look back on us, there will have been something that made you happy.”

Like a man in a dream, he stepped into the doorway.

Simó picked up his lantern. Reaching out in the dark, he retrieved his flint from the niche he’d found for it in the rough-hewn wall. Brilliant though she was, Ysabel would never have thought of such things. He struck it until the wick lit, then held the flint in his hand for a heartbeat. Shutting his eyes against his pain, he slipped it into his pocket.

With one hand on the interior lever that closed the door, Simó hesitated. He knew he shouldn’t look back, but the very chance of seeing her had become so necessary to happiness that he couldn’t resist it now, not when it would be the last time. The very last time.

Slowly, he glanced back over his shoulder.

Ysabel had moved with her usual ghostly grace. The tanist of Clan Viernes stood in the centre of her room. The strengthening evening breeze blew stronger, fluttering her white robes about her. Perhaps she had not expected him to turn round again. Perhaps she had. Her expression betrayed nothing: neither satisfaction, nor regret. As they stood in silence the slanting rays of the setting sun caught her hair, crowning her in a nimbus of molten gold.

“Goodbye, Ysabel,” he said, and turned from her, stepping into the dark of the passageway. He hesitated for one last moment. Then he pulled the lever and the door closed behind him, shutting out the light.

 

* * *

 

 

  
  


  



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